(The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!)
I was wary of another yeast bread challenge. The last one didn’t turn out particularly well, but I figured I’d give this a shot.
Povitica is a yeast bread with a nut filling. It gets rolled out very thin, the topping goes on top, then it’s rolled up like a jelly roll and folder into a pan for baking. This recipe makes 4 loves – that’s a lot of nut bread.
The dough gets mixed up and kneaded:
Then split into 4 portions to rise.
After an hour and a half of rising, it gets rolled out. The instructions said "thin enough to read through". I got pretty close to that. Having the marble rolling pin really helps – without it, my back would have been killing me by the second loaf.
The filling goes on top:
Then it gets rolled up and goes into pans. I don’t own four bread pans, so I made do with my clay cooker and some CorningWare:
Then 45 minutes of baking. I should have been a bit more gentle – in some of the pans, the bread split open.
After half an hour of cooling, I had bread:
It was really good. I did three loaves with walnuts, and one with pecans and chocolate. I haven’t cut into that one yet, but the walnut loaves were great. We took two loaves to work, and they pretty much disappeared. I’d make it again – only next time, not 4 loaves at a time!
